Turning the land-grant mission into cinema

The digital marketing series is a behind the scenes look at projects, campaigns, tools, tricks and other marketing machinations happening at Oregon State University.

An emotional connection

Whenever a police car is following along behind me I get this overwhelming sense of panic and fear. Usually they speed ahead or turn off in other pursuits but for that instant I am frozen thinking about all the possible laws I could have broken. It doesn’t matter what city I’m in, if they are a sheriff, state trooper or even campus security they all bring that same reaction. For many reasons (media, TV, personal experience) over time the law enforcement brand has developed this emotional connection.

That is exactly what we should strive for in our marketing efforts, although probably along the lines of hope and positivity instead of panic and fear. If we can create that kind of emotional response when people encounter our brand we will have joined the elite.

Ignore their minds connect with their hearts

Sometimes we get stuck trying to force our “Strategic message” on audiences that can’t relate. A great example of this is our Brand Statement. “Oregon State University is an authentic community, whose accomplishments, inclusive excellence, innovation and leadership promote a healthy planet, wellness and economic progress.”

Your average human doesn’t think in these terms, that statement is really hard to understand. They don’t have a history of higher ed nomenclature to pull from. The base instinct that we are actually going for is “OSU, yeah they are super smart” or “OSU, they always impress me”.

Our typical pattern would be to do a very good job of storytelling. We would find a research breakthrough and if we were good we would come up with a way to make it relatable. It could be in written form, story, video, web site, etc.. Then if we were really good we would have systems in place or ways to make sure that content had maximum exposure.

Does that sound familiar? The content was created from an institutional perspective. The likelihood of creating an emotional response is pretty low. What if we came at it from a different direction? What if we created content with the purpose of getting people to think “wow, they are super smart”. We could come up with content that taught people something and not academic sense, more on a real life level. I bet if you made a list you could think of five things that you have always wanted to learn or maybe it’s five life hacks you learned in the last year.

Here is my list

Learn how to be an average singer. I don’t want to be a rock star I just want to be able to sing karaoke and people not hate it.

What are the best house plants and how to keep them alive? Plants are great to have around but I used to kill everything. A simple guide on what plants are easiest to grow and how to keep them alive would go a long way.

Poetry, I have always had an interest in writing poetry but I have no clue where to start. A basic guide would be really helpful in potentially unlocking something I’m passionate about.

How to change a flat tire. It seems silly but this is not a skill that you are born with and is useful for everyone.

So imagine we developed a series of content that accomplished all of these things. They were branded OSU but just cut right to the topic, no bull, no core messages. Imagine if you learned how to sing from a YouTube series? Wouldn’t you have a great connection with whoever provided that? The positive experience would transfer to the brand, people would consider us to be knowledgeable only because they had an experience where we taught them something as simple as how to change a flat tire.

Not only does this simple transference happen, but the content we would be producing is much more shareable and has a chance to reach a much larger audience. Even the best breakthrough research content has a limited audience and it is also temporal. Todays innovations are old news tomorrow.

Disclaimers

This is just one example and it might not even be a good one. It just represents the shift in how we could be connecting to our audiences in addition what we do now.

The OSU brand statement is not meant to actually show up in any collateral it is by definition steeped in academic terms. I very much believe in our brand statement and think that it is quite well written. It is just the easiest example I could find.

My visceral reactions to law enforcement, following me, no way reflects how I actually feel about them. I am deeply thankful for the men and women who dedicate their careers to protecting our communities. It’s also quite possible that the negative emotion tied to their brand is a good thing. It might help keep crime in check.

The digital marketing series is a behind the scenes look at projects, campaigns, tools, tricks and other marketing machinations happening at Oregon State University.

Maximizing reach

So much of advertising depends on reach. It doesn’t matter what medium or channel you are considering. Before you can drive engagement and deliver conversions you have to start by reaching your audience.

Sometimes reach at a university ebbs and flows outside of our control. During the summer months reach is diminished. Students leave, faculty go on vacation and our physical touch points start to dry up. The same goes for our digital space, during these months some of our audiences have fewer reasons to go to our home page. The natural (unpaid) forces that provide motivation for people to enter our funnel temporarily dry up.

Commencement 2015

There are also a few times each year where our natural reach is maximized. During commencement our touch points increase. Parents, siblings, alumni, current students, etc. all coming to campus, some for the first time in years. Web traffic analysis shows that this is also a peak time for the university home page and core sites.

As bargain hunting marketers we make an effort to pounce on the opportunity. Every year our department composes features about our graduates often including stories and videos detailing their exploits and possible career options. This allows us to celebrate the university through the stories about some really interesting people. These are particularly useful in targeting our prospective parent demographic. Parents want to imagine their students getting a degree and moving on with the job of their dreams and we happily share examples with them. Callie our storytelling guru and Darryl, the lord commander of video production, usually pair up to make excellent content.

Here is one student from this year’s graduating class.

Normally these profiles would be inserted into our carousel towards the top of the Oregon State home page. Without going on a rant I’ll just say I’m not much of a carousel fan. Typically this feature of our site has a 1.3% click through rate. You can spin that number however you want, but to me it isn’t good enough. This year we decided to try something new.

Going outside of the box

It is unrealistic to consider completely redesigning our home page for this one use and the current design was never constructed to be very flexible in terms of layout. We decided that there might be a way to augment it with some small CSS tricks in order to take advantage of this temporarily increased reach. Oliver (one of our graphic designers — which is oversimplifying his amazing talents, but I digress) came up with the concept of adding functionality that allowed the home page to essentially slide away revealing bonus content. The thought would be to make it feel like you were finding a secret or something hidden. Making an emotional connection rather than the expected experience with the carousel. The simple act of changing the background to an image, instead of a color, might register with the users that something has changed.

Screenshot of our home page with a background image for the first time. You can also see the button that was added.

After talking it through we came up with a fairly simple solution. We inserted a new graphic that when clicked slid the main content area of the home page to the right revealing our special commencement feature. This was done with one line of jQuery and absolutely positioning the commencement feature underneath the main container with CSS. We played around with all sorts of ideas, but this seemed like the best compromise. We didn’t want to impede the user experience by forcing people to go through this feature, but we also wanted it to be interruptive enough that it would be noticeable.

After clicking the button, in the left corner of the page, the main content area slides to the right exposing our commencement feature.

The results are in

By attaching event tracking to the button, that activated the animation, we were able to track how many times users interacted with our marketing Frankenstein feature. During the 14 days that this feature was on the home page it was “opened” 3,956 times by 2,652 unique users. Those numbers in isolation tell me that at least some people figured out how to interact with this new feature and absorbed some of our storytelling goodness. A few of which probably clicked on it a few times for the fun of it.

A more complete pictures comes into play when you know that there were 101,906 unique users that visited the home page over that same 14 day window. Giving us a usage rate of 2.6% (amount of unique people who interacted out of the total unique people who possibly could have). That is almost double our standard CTR of the carousel, so in some sense you could consider this a smashing success. I also heard anecdotally that people enjoyed the hidden content and generally thought it was a pretty cool feature.

However, I can’t help but feel a little pessimistic. Capturing less than 3% of our users just doesn’t feel good enough. There are all sorts of reasons why I could explain it away. Maybe the button was not very noticeable. Maybe people saw it, but there were no visual queues for them to know that it was clickable. Most likely people saw it and didn’t care. Those users show up wanting to fulfill whatever task they came for and have little interest in being caught our web.

I suppose the takeaway here is understanding that these natural cycles exist and that they can be a valuable tool for maximizing reach. It is also important to explore new techniques and creative ways to capture your extended reach. We proved that it can have a positive impact, but we also found we have plenty to learn when it comes to understanding our audience and the best way to connect with them.

Time lapse photography has occupied my attention for several years. The visual passing of time strikes a chord with the part of me that is in constant daydream mode. With most of my experience coming from video production and not photography I had (and very much still have) a lot to learn. At this point I should mention that when I refer to time lapse I am typically referencing the process of combining numerous photographs into video form as opposed to dramatically speeding up recorded video. I flirted with both and settled on the photography base as my preferred method.

Start simple

My first foray into the world of time lapse was pretty basic. I started with a fixed camera taking “standard” photos, usually over the course of 30-40 minutes. Nothing special here, but I was trying to convert my video knowledge into basic photography principles. It was fun, but not particularly successful.

What I learned

You need a really sturdy tripod base. Any vibration or movement will more or less ruin the party.

Understand the passage of time and how fast your subject moves. Things that move slower require a longer interval between photos to create any effect. Think of a plant growing from a seed. You might have to take one photo every week to notice any difference. ON a busy street corner you could take a photo every 3-5 seconds. The sky is popular component of good landscape time lapse. Keep in mind that an interval of at least 10 seconds is useful to create dynamic cloud movement.

Understand how long you have to actually run your time lapse. Not being a fan of basic math I struggled with this. For example, pretend you are setup to do a nice landscape time lapse. You reckon since the clouds are slow moving you might want to have an interval of 12 seconds between photos. Going with the assumption that you are going to produce a 24 frames per second video (cinematic standard) it will require 24 still images to make up one second of video. With this information we can figure out how much actual time you need to have your camera running for every second of time lapse video. 12(seconds between photos) X 24(total frames needed for a second of footage) = 288 seconds or a little less than 5 minutes. If you are ever going to use the time lapse for anything you want a time lapse to last on screen for at least 10 seconds (at the very least). So if we extend that information we now have 5(minutes for every second of video) X 10(minimum length of useful video) = 50 minutes! The takeaway here is to plan out your shots, in some cases be prepared to be out there for hours.

Motion Controlled Time Lapse

Naturally after I crawled further into the subject I noticed people making incredible camera movements throughout their time lapses. I was obsessed and had to figure it out. The concepts are all the same, but now you introduce the technique of moving your camera during the interval between photos. Each movement is incredibly subtle, but over the course of the entire time lapse it adds up to, in some cases, a six foot slide or a 180 degree pan.

In order to jump into this technique some additional equipment is required. There are many manufacturers out there so I won’t get into specifics, but you will need a system that will drive the motion of your camera over time including a control system that can program the movement. Some have been able to master this with a simple slider and moving your camera by hand, but human error makes this very difficult. Having this controlled mechanically and by a computer provides a much more consistent result.

(Random example of some time lapse with motion. There are tons of amazing examples on YouTube and Vimeo.)

Motion Control Systems

Hyper Lapse

After spending a lot of time practicing the “vanilla” time lapse and even leaping into some motion controlled projects I was pretty engrossed in the art form. I mention art form because it’s more and more evident to me that you will only get as far as your creative mind will take you. I consider myself fairly well educated in the science of time lapse but to truly get the shots that make you go “wow” you need that left brain point of view. I don’t say this to deter you, but be prepared to crawl on the ground, climb a mountain or do whatever it takes to find that elusive void to make art.

Darryl, another time lapse acolyte in our department, turned me on to the concept of a hyper lapse. Instead of taking tiny movements sliding or revolving around a fixed point (tripod) you move the whole package throughout space. An example of this is approaching an object of note from say a 100 yards away. Between intervals you would move your tripod in a very controlled manner. If done well this creates a “sliding” movement but on a very large scale. This technique becomes another layer of complexity that takes a while to master.

(You can see the hyper lapse concept in a commercial we produced for Oregon State. They create an almost dreamlike feel.)

What I learned

Planning is even more critical for this kind of move. You want a relatively straight path free of obstacles and hazards. If a car parks itself along your path the party is over. Try to have your move as linear as possible. Since you are mimicking a sliding movement you don’t want to have to bend around a tree or else it breaks the illusion.

Although you are moving your whole tripod the camera needs to stay locked onto the target. Think of looking through your viewfinder as crosshairs. You want to move your tripod and then re adjust the camera so it is still framed similarly. Using your grid will help with this, but ultimately takes a lot of practice. If you change your framing the video will end up a little insane. (you just have to see for yourself)

This technique requires some manipulation on the video processing end. Because this is done by a human hand inevitably there will be some wobbles in your path. Using a tool like the warp stabilizer in Adobe Premiere/After Effects does a great job of smoothing out these rough edges.

My love for time lapse photography will always evolve as I learn, but that’s part of the fun. I haven’t even scratched the surface of Night Sky time lapse. Being in Oregon there is always a vista just down the road. Trial and error in one of the most beautiful areas in the world. I could do worse.

I recently got a tour of the new online catalog that our Extension office built. Essentially it houses all of their publications in one easy to navigate Drupal site. For anyone with Drupal or database experience you know that alone is a heroic task. The site is full of features and cool modules. It is a shining example of quality content, great architecture and strong development. A big congrats to everyone in Extension and Experiment Station Communications who knocked this one out of the park.

Every now and again I get to help Justin and Darryl on their video projects. Most of the time it is usually because they know I would have a personal interest in the subject matter. This time it was for an upcoming video to be aired on the Pac12 network. It features Ruth Hamblin, the starting center for the OSU women’s basketball team. The final story hasn’t come together just yet, but the general idea focuses on her being able to balance being (AN AWESOME) division I athlete and an engineering student, which is considered by many one of the more difficult and time intensive undergraduate degrees at OSU.

Side Rant

I want to go back to her being an awesome athlete. I watch a lot of college basketball, mostly mens, but over the last couple years I have started to watch more NCAA women’s basketball. The women’s team is leaps and bounds more fun to watch. From a pure basketball standpoint they win hands down. Their fundamentals are strong, they can shoot from anywhere on the court and they actually run an offense instead of the weird quasi-offense that our mens team runs. In the middle of all the excitement though is Ruth. She is absolutely one of the most devastating defensive presences I have seen at any level of basketball. The way she impacts the game is really fun to watch. She recently put together a 10 block game, which also included around 20 shots altered (insane!). She is just a sophomore, which basically means who knows how crazy good she will be after two more years of training.

I shouldn’t let my singular praise overshadow the rest of the team. From top to bottom the women’s team is filled with ballers. With only one senior, and I think also only one junior, the team is set up to make a deep NCAA run in the next couple years. Point guard Sydney Wiese is a freshman with excellent ball handling skills and court vision, not to mention a crowd stirring super quick southpaw 3pt shot. She has unlimited potential and will be fun to watch. Honestly, I could go player by player and talk about all their amazing abilities, but there isn’t enough space and you really just need to get out and watch them in person. You won’t regret taking in one of their next home games.

End Rant

Ultimately the point of this is to share the fun opportunities we get working at Interactive Communications. For me it was a big personal bonus to get to meet Ruth and thanks to Justin’s quick thinking I got the absolute great honor of getting my turn-around shot rejected by “The Hammer.” Below is photo proof of the sequence. I can now check getting stuffed, by OSU’s best shot blocker in history, off my bucket list.

Step 1: Think you can make a shot

Step 2: Get destroyed (pretty sure she barely tried)

Step 3: Have a good laugh because it was the most fun failure in my entire life

Over the last year or two we have been working to get our google analytics profiles under control. When they were initially setup there wasn’t much future thinking involved. At the time it wasn’t the go to metrics source for our sites, so I am not surprised that it was developed a bit hastily. We don’t yet have a perfect picture. We are still gaining access to analytics on several key sites, but now we can at least put out the first OSU Big Board. Essentially a list of the top 50 used sites at OSU.

This list is based off page views per day. There are some notable caveats to this list that I will try to highlight after. For comparison the OSU Home Page or front page comes in at 47,893 page views per day. All data was averaged from September 1st, 2012 and June 30th, 2013.

1. “Online Services” – 154,664 – This is the backbone of the university. I will surmise that this will forever be the most used online entity at OSU. All audiences use this for various reasons. Class registration, schedules, grades, transcripts, employee benefits, pay information, general account information.

2. OSU Main – 32,085 – Includes the top tier links for OSU and all of the audiences specific landing pages. Also includes a few micro sites. This is essentially everything that makes up OSU’s homepage except for the front page itself.

10. College of Public Health and Human Sciences – 3,522 – Credit them for having a single site that contains most of their college pages/entities. It is a larger site to manage but benefits from greater exposure for all parts.

11. OSU Cascades Campus – 3,288 – I expect to see this grow as they become a full four year university.

12. College of Business – 3,007 – Again benefiting from a single site for most of their departments and programs.

There are several sites that we don’t have access to that seem like they would get a lot of traffic. Those include the Alumni Association, International Programs, the College of Forestry, OSU Library, Student Health Services and of course our Athletics site and several other academic related departments and programs. Applications like Banner, Blackboard, MyTime and others are likely very heavily used but because of their third party status we aren’t able to integrate our profile.

I will update this information a couple times throughout the academic year. We will include data on sites that move up and down this list and try to identify indicators for that movement.

This is a quick video tour of our new office space. It is also a test run of a new toy that Justin put together. He picked up the new GoPo HERO3+ and built a motorized brushless gimbal. Which of course means, a thingy that helps keep the camera stable and smooth while you move around.

The test turned out well. He tossed on a warp stabilizer in premiere for kicks, but honestly I think it wasn’t worth it. You can see a little bit of the warp side effects when you first come down the stairs. Otherwise it provided a really smooth hyper stable shot. This isn’t our first venture into “steadicams”. We tried something called a Cowboy, which was borderline a scam. We went with an actual steadicam, but the lack of uber forearm strength has really limited our abilities. This contraption is very lightweight making it easy to get the shot. You can also do it 4 or 5 times over, which we all know is what we really need to get it right.

Toss that on top of the freaky high quality image that you can get from the newest Go Pro Hero3+ and you have a pretty sweet rig. Next we need to take it out to the track or in the field somewhere to give it a real test.

This next June will mark seven years from when I started working in the Marketing Department as an intern. From there transitioning to where I am today in Web Communications.

During that time rumors about moving offices always seemed to persist. Every other month there was a different remodeling, renovating, redesigning or re-something idea floating around. There is nobody to blame really. Universities are notoriously slow and cumbersome when it comes to things like this. Toss in the fact that most of the people in our department are dreamers and you end up with an ever evolving sense of possibilities!

Well it finally happened. Essentially we kicked out the Geospatial Services group in the basement of Adams. They definitely got the crappy end of the stick on that one. I feel for my friends in that group. I will miss the ever-present smell of toast, wafting down the hall, in the morning. After they moved we went to work as a team. Cleaning, painting, laying new wood floor (pretty hoss for a bunch of web geeks), putting up the trim and eventually putting together what can only be described as an Ikea office showroom.

Immediately as you come down the stairs you see our chalk wall of productivity. This is space for Dave to layout our current and upcoming projects. Think wall sized gantt chart

If you turn to the left you will now see our cozy little living room space. I envision doing some of the more mundane tasks while lounging on the couch half asleep. It is a little hard to see but we also have the most glorious rug. It has a moose-like animal on it. I feel like it is a work of art and have a hard time stepping on it. Callie picked it out and will receive a 5% per month pay increase for excellent rug taste. At least that is what would happen if I had any say/control over such things. For the greater good it is probably best that I do not.

Here is a good look at the general office setup. We all get our own desk space and grid like shelving unit. You can add cubbies, drawers or cabinets to fit your own personal style. We certainly haven’t figured everything out with this new environment, but that will come with time. We might also end up hating each other, it is hard to forecast. Either way I feel like it will work itself out.

Lastly, we have a nice section for our interns. Since over the years they have done most of the work around here we figured they should also get a nice clean work space. If you are a bright person and want to continue doing all of our work as an intern shoot us an email, we are pretty much always hiring.

I forgot to get a picture of our new video editing suite, but it is also pretty incredible. It will be a big asset for our projects and random youtube video watching abilities (always during lunch…). Below is a list of things we have learned mixed in with things that I think we will have to conquer as a group.

Temperature: It is pretty impossible to please everyone. It seems like it is boiling lava hot or frigid. Still have to find that middle ground.

Music: I like to blare my music loud and I have been known to listen to a new hit jam 10 times in a row. You can assume that nobody else on the planet would enjoy that.

Assembling that much Ikea furniture sucks. We need special interns just for that.

Using a nail gun makes you feel like a tough guy.

Smells: You can use your imagination here. There hasn’t been any big problems yet, but it seems like an inevitability at this point. Somebody is going to bring in some sort of stinky egg lunch and the whole office will notice.

By moving to the basement we have taken small steps in eliminating all contact with other humans. Sometimes stray customers from parking services happen by, but someday I am confident we can get that to zero incidences.

Having this space has spurred the idea of doing potluck breakfast once a month. The first one was fantastic, I gorged myself on bacon products. The only downside is knowing that I have to wait a full month until the next one.

Darryl Lai being pulled by lead sled dog Justin Smith. Both are Web Communications staff members.

You might wonder how the title of this relates to the above photo so let me try and establish the scene. Darryl (AKA “Da-REAL Deal”) squirreled himself into some kind of tiny sled. The reason this tiny sled exists still evades my comprehension. Justin then attached this strange sled to his waist much like a sled dog. This weird setup was an attempt at getting a tracking shot of a cross country skiier. The idea was that the skiier would come at them while justin ran along pulling Darryl on his tiny sled.

The trouble was that it absolutely didn’t work. The motion was so rocky that it really didn’t turn out well. Now I didn’t watch further than the first 30 seconds and they are very good at post processing so maybe it will be usable. However, I kind of doubt it. The purpose of this post is to show you what it takes to make really high quality work (in any field). You have to be excited about the possibility of failure. You have to continue to try new things, take leaps of faith, screw up and hopefully do better next time.

This isn’t supposed to be a warm and fuzzy motivational pitch this is just simple fact. If you want to do anything great (doesn’t matter what it is) you have to try everything. No matter how crazy or weird it might seem. You have to do whatever it takes to get that epic shot.

I went to the Oregon Zoo earlier this week. The hope is that we can work together and form a partnership around the beaver habitat. Maybe some day we will have livebeavercam.edu available for you to go to (official title still to be determined). Anyways it was also quite enjoyable on a personal level because this was my first trip to the zoo. The highlight, of course, were the beavers, but there were lots of other great animals and educational opportunities as well. I strongly urge you to visit if you have the opportunity.

Things Kegan learned at the zoo

Melody, our marketing director, has a reoccurring nightmare about bears.

The beavers are way bigger than expected. We are talking like 20-40 lbs.

Inside the beaver den is a magical looking place, that is warm and cozy. I really wanted to crawl in there.

Elephants have huge bladders and well, for lack of more eloquent speech, “drop a massive load when they urinate”.

While we are on the subject, Polar bears urinate in the their own pool, which if I remember from growing up is a big no no.

The baby elephant lilly is incredible cute and I could watch her run around for hours.

Monkeys are arrogant and think they are better than me (constantly plotting their escape).

Lions are definitely king of the jungle.

Some bird (that I don’t recall the name of) acts as a scout for the mongoose while it hunts. While the mongoose scares up insects for the bird to eat. The perfect form of animal teamwork.